


roll tape

by ineachandeveryway



Category: The Underland Chronicles - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Gen, Gregor/Luxa - Freeform, Howard/Nerissa
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-23
Updated: 2014-12-23
Packaged: 2018-03-03 00:45:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2831999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ineachandeveryway/pseuds/ineachandeveryway
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog of non-definitive acts, something other than the desperation." Post-Code of Claw.</p>
            </blockquote>





	roll tape

**Author's Note:**

> My gift to thecityofregalia, for her TUC Fic Exchange on Tumblr! The prompt was a poem by Richard Siken, "Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out". 
> 
> This began as a one-shot, but I think I'm going to make it into a six-part fic, instead. It basically covers the everyday lives of the characters after the series ends, one year at a time, and assuming that Gregor's family did indeed move to Virginia. 
> 
> The same characters will be used every chapter in the same order, and some relationships not totally implied in the books may be implied here given my preference. Kudos would be largely appreciated! Enjoy!

If there is one thing Gregor can appreciate about Virginia, it’s the green.

Memories of that other world don’t come to mind as easily against this landscape. The nightmares are fewer and more mellow, and sometimes he lets her face lead him out of them and into a dream. The purple of her eyes crinkles like an amethyst geode when it basks in the sunlight. He holds out his fingers and tries to touch her amidst the ethereal blackness.

But she always disappears.

 

Lizzie meets a boy on the first day of middle school. His name is Clark. He has brown hair and freckles. She thinks she likes him, but she can’t be certain.

He looks over her shoulder during extension period and watches with attentive silence as she works the math puzzles her brother got for her birthday. She works with a quick hand, dashing numbers onto the paper with lightning speed, completely unaware of his observing presence.

And then he says, “I think that should be a nine.”

She has never been more mortified.

 

Her life has never been a farm life. Grace has never been a farm girl. And yet she’s the one to insist that they live here, in this yellow-green unknown, in this hidden memory she never thought she’d touch after she graduated from college with a bachelors degree in anthropology.

He takes her hand one night when she’s perched on a haystack and looking at the stars, or what’s left of them past the clouds. She looks him in the eye, and starts to trace the lines running across his face with her finger. The years down under have rendered them permanent in his skin. He looks ten years older than he should be, and the dye in his hair isn’t enough to hide the gray at his roots.

She still thinks he’s beautiful, though. And there’s a smokeless sky behind her to prove it.

 

Ripred misses the boy more than he’d like to admit. That much is true. Anything beyond that, however, is debatable.

Lapblood’s pups are two sides of the same coin. Where Sixclaw is stubborn and noble, Flyfur is agile and calculating. The two bicker with each other to the point that he finds it practically unbearable, but in practice and in battle, they do tend to remind him of the boy, of the lightning fast movements and crimson spray, of the hesitation afterwards.

Ripred almost smiles once. Lapblood tells him so.

 

He is making rounds in the hospital one day when Nerissa touches his shoulder.

Howard flinches, coat billowing about him as he turns to face her. She wears her hair in a braided bun that hangs against the back of her neck, and her eyes, orchid in color, shine a little brighter than they did the day before. He stares at her, breathless, and just a little lost in the upward tilt of her lips.

She asks him if he has seen Vikus today, and he answers, yes, just two minutes ago, in the room two doors to the left of this hallway. She bows her head in thanks and moves in the direction he mentioned, but some impulse pushes him to catch her fingers in his hand, and he feels her shiver from her toes to the tips of her hair.

“Yes?” she says.

“There’s dirt in your hair.”

 

Boots doesn’t think twice when talking to the cockroaches.

She gets along with the creatures quite well, and though their entire language wasn't imparted to her during her stay in the Underland, her friends’ counterparts aboveground are no less in teaching, and she catches on quickly, sometimes, clicking and twitching when she isn’t supposed to. This gets her some stares from her grandpa.

The stares that matter, though, come a few weeks into their stay. A girl walks up the hill with a bucket of eggs as brown as chocolate milk, held in her arms like a child. She makes for the barn, but stops to peer at Boots, pressed to the ground, cockroach in her muddied palm. The girl narrows her eyes and listens for a moment, then huffs and returns to the task at hand.

“Weirdo,” she says as she passes by.

Boots has never heard the word.

 

Does she think about the Warrior often? Her grandfather’s eyes seem to ask her that question every time that she visits.

Though Luxa does manage to throw it off with a nonchalant smile most of the time, there are nights when she lies awake in her spider silk sheets, trying to draw his face with her fingers in the towering ceiling. She finds it strange that she can’t remember the color of his skin, and whether it was painted like the dirt in the Fount or that thing he called cocoa.

It helps if she thinks of the opposite of herself.

 

He takes his first teaching job in years at the local elementary school, which in this area caters from kindergarten--his assignment--to the fifth grade. The children in his class are anxious and wide eyed, and they poke at his legs like mice out of the womb, blinded by the innocence of their dove white fur.

Like before, he teaches science. And though his fingers do tremble when he first touches rodents in the encyclopedia, one girl comes up and steadies his hand in trying to ask a question. He smiles, albeit warily, and takes her into his lap, letting her perch on the left of his two legs and act as his pointer.

It’s his first day without strife, and for that he’s grateful.

 

Of the creatures he has met in the Underland, the rats--reformed, of course--are the most to his liking.

Hazard takes a particular interest in the Peacemaker, making it his problem to escort the scar faced leader wherever he goes. His cousin is slow to approve, still harbouring some grudges about the pompous, though friendly Gnawer, and Ripred himself makes sure to snivel and complain as they walk throughout the palace, though the affection in his voice is by now too obvious to ignore.

The Bond held by the two leaders is still fresh. Hazard knows this. He bears it in mind when he walks the graying fighter to High Hall every other week, when he sits silently at his place near the end of the summit table, when he translates sentences almost as naturally as he eats and sleeps. He knows it better than anything.

But what he also knows is that he wants a father, too.

 

She knows she shouldn't be sending the letters. Grace would never approve of it.

But it doesn’t stop her from thinking how Gregor would feel if she weren't to slip them under the rock in Central Park. Or Lizzie, or Boots. They all have their worries, after all, and their stories to share.

Mrs. Cormaci smiles at her twelve-year-old helper’s letters the most. Unlike his sisters’, his messages have not one recipient, but more than she can count on her fingers. Each message is different, too, with a unique tone and cadence to it. One is even written in a code she’s never had the chance of seeing before, with scratches and points. She can guess that it says Love, Gregor at the end.

True, she’s wrong to send them. Totally and inexcusably wrong.

But who’s to say she can’t embrace it?

 

There is a moment where she thinks that her flesh may be thicker on her bones, and though it shouldn't, it frightens her.

She twists and turns in her sleeveless gown, splaying out her arms for the mirror glass to catch. The slight curvature of her ulna is less pronounced against her alabaster skin, though only by a fraction, and for once, her hair doesn’t rest on her back in tangled, matted braids, but against her neck in a bun that Dulcet spun for her earlier in the morning. Nerissa looks at her reflection in the mirror and finds a person she doesn’t recognize staring back.

Should she be happy? she wonders, turning again in the dim candlelight.

The truth is, she doesn’t know.

 

He grows to think of the unresponding part of his body as Solovet.

Luxa doesn’t understand when he first tries to tell her, making incoherent movements with his hands and scratches with charcoal on paper. She looks at him strangely, but with a longing in her eyes, and when she knows she may never understand, she reaches out to touch Vikus’s shoulder and pulls him into a hug. In a sense, it comforts him, to know that the connection is only his and his wife’s to bear.

He looks after his granddaughter when she leaves the room every day, and wonders if from now on, it will always be like this, if she will feed him at every meal, if she will talk to him at every chance she gets, if she will never leave him alone, because by now, the love she holds for him has pierced her too deep.

The hope in his heart is hard to waver. 


End file.
